The contents of today's post had been posted on our Patreon months ago, as well as have been throughly discussed on our Discord server multiple times, which you can find in the link below.
It's a publicly available Discord, so feel free to join!
Discord: https://discord.gg/DB3F9jN
This blogpost also serves as a summary for 2020 kinda, so I don't need to repeat answering questions that are regularly coming up.
2020 was frankly spoken a disaster for me on a personal level.
I get that everyone had a horrible 2020, but added to all the covid shenanigans and everything that was going on in the world, I had some really devastating "personal" problems that were not related to that at all.
Let's get right into it.
In 2018 I expanded my team using my own savings.
Most of this money was actually inherited money from family members that passed away.
The people I hired, I of course paid regularly and in full.
I never failed to pay wages, and I always upheld my part of the deal.
Deathblight Guilty Raid was ENTIRELY self funded.
That explains where the money I had came from, and why I had such big expenses in the end.
The expenses are documented, and MOST of the people I hired actually finished their work.
Anyone who disbelieves this can hop on our Discord and just ask around, there's enough people who can confirm that I paid them thousands of USD over the course of many many months, and those are also the people who delivered.
Now throughout 2018 to 2020 we've been working on Deathblight Guilty Raid.
And the expenses hit roughly spoken 50 000 USD in the end.
The first demo version should have come out in April 2019, and it would have been possible.
But there's been delays and I was too nice and understanding to certain people, so instead of firing them I gave them the benefit of the doubt and pushed on.
I continued paying wages of course.
I also dealt with burnout around that time due to the sheer amount of stress and extra work I had, but I somehow managed to move the project forward.
In February 2020 I learned from a friend of mine that my programmer, BladeFire, lied to me and hated working on the game.
Roughly spoken, he admited to my friend that he was not doing his work properly on purpose.
I gave him a chance to come out himself, but he didn't do so, so eventually I confronted him about it shortly before the demo release of DBGR, and he gave me a bunch of excuses, nothing more than that.
Deathblight Guilty Raid had it's demo release in April 2020, but I suspected that this would be the end of the game due to BladeFire's dishonesty and lack of work ethic.
The way I planned the project, he was to finish all the remaining programming, I didn't have any time in my own schedule to do that myself.
And with him not doing his work and backstabbing me, there's just no way it can ever be completed.
Since then he repeatedly told me that all of this "was just a mistake", and that he "didn't mean it".
So I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, but not give him any more money.
After all he failed to deliver what I already paid him for, and I wouldn't give him more chances to exploit me.
He delivered, at most, 33% of the work I paid him for, and I'm being very generous here.
Promising me he would finish the game "without further payments", as I already paid him for it to begin with, I decided to give him several months before I make any public announcements.
(we talked with our fanbase on Discord about it though)
And well, to this day, there never has been a single something on DBGR he could show me.
So with this blogpost, I hereby "officially" announce that the project is absolutely dead.
I invested 50 000 USD into it, with the exception of BladeFire, everyone did their job and what I paid them for.
It's just that the programming is the critical component missing, and thus the game can't be delivered.
I am not willing to hire someone else to do the job.
Nor do I have any savings left to pay another programmer for work I already paid Blade for.
I can't do the work myself due to being busy with all my other work.
So the game is simply dead.
Unfortunately, this wasn't the only bad thing that happened to me in 2020.
Patreon contacted us around October 2020 and asked us to make changes to our content and to drop Deathblight RPG entirely.
We had a lot of back and forth, trying to figure out what needed to be done and where the issues lay.
In the end we decided to remove all adult content from Patreon, because the way they "judge" if something is okay or not is really blurry and not quite consistent.
So in the end, to stay on the safe side, we decided to drop all adult content completely from Patreon.
There's only ecchi and nudity at times, but I believe that falls into "mature content"?
At any rate, that's that.
With Deathblight RPG no longer being funded, and with the game never going to be sold (that was our promise from the beginning), there is just no way it can go on.
So this project is dead as well.
Will there be new games in the future?
Sooner or later, yes.
I started making hentai games as a hobby back in 2012, and I became a full time developer out of necessity.
Since I really love hentai games, I always want to create some.
But I can't say when or what the next game will be at this point in time.
They will most likely be self funded and NOT funded by Patreon or anything like that.
Which means I need to recover my savings first and establish a budget to work with, or perhaps find some other way to pull this off.
People who work on projects like to be paid, so without money I can't possibly do it as noone worth their salt would work for me for free.
Until then we will just be doing webcomics since that has proven to be the only reliable source of income we had all these years, and you gotta stick to what makes you money.
Finally since only Crescentia and I (Wolfenstahl) work on these, there are no delays and no disruptions, as we never failed to deliver a webcomic page in like 5+ years and more than 450+ pages of doing this.
Which speaks for itself.
If it's just Cres and me, we can pull things off no problem.
If we need to rely on other people, which unfortunately for game projects we need to do... it get's wonky.
Still, despite these bad experiences, once I recovered from this I do want to try hiring people again, someday.
That being said, feel free to join our Discord and hang out with us over there!
Discord: https://discord.gg/DB3F9jN
See ya around.
